Internet searching is now the subject of much activity as well as research. Search engines for both general and specific purposes abound. For example, search engines from such websites as Yahoo.com, Excite.com, Lycos.com, Northernlight.com, all attempt to build an index of the world wide web by accumulating website information in a centralized database on a centralized computer system. Thus, any of these systems involves literally indexing tens of millions of pages of information in order to allow a search against that information be accomplished. Thus, when a user desires to find specific information, the selected search engine must search its centralized index database. Further, the centralized database must continue to update its database of web pages or other computerized information in order to be current and accurate in the searching that is performed. Obviously this inefficiency results in a difficult and computationally expensive task.
Because of the structure of the centralized indexed database, search engines are relatively static and do not receive instantaneous updates of information on individual websites as those websites change. In addition, as new websites become active on the Internet or as websites become inactive, search engines do not necessarily pick up this fact leading to the reporting of results for websites that may no longer be present on the web and missing the results from new websites.
Search engines also will never be able to contain all information from all websites. This necessarily leads to searches which are not complete and result in missed websites and information. Finally, certain search engines can be manipulated to deliver preferred websites. Thus, an individual user searching the web may not receive the best websites but will receive websites which the particular search engine prefers.
Enhancement of the web surfing process has been the subject of invention. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,761,663 to Lagarde et al was issued for a “Method for Distributed Task Fulfillment of Web Browser requests.” This invention causes requests from a browser to be made to web servers on a network which receive and fulfill requests as an agent of the browser client. Thus, either individuals searching by agents must take place or, databases again exist which must be searched and which would potentially suffer from the same problems as described above.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,974,409 to Sanu et al was issued for a “System and Method for Locating Information in an Online Network.” This particular system operates as an extension of a computer's operating system and not as a separate browser. Again, multiple servers search different services in order to obtain information on what is stored in the various services.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,974,441 to Rogers et al was issued for a “WWW Client Server Interactive System Method with Java.” This patent makes requests to web servers on a network which receive and fulfill requests as an agent of the browser client. It organizes distributed sub agents in a series of servers which then conduct searching. Thus, a distributed network of servers conduct additional searches returning the results to the client.
Other systems such as U.S. Pat. No. 6,055,526 to Ambroziak (“A Data Indexing Technique”), U.S. Pat. No. 5,995,959 to Friedman et al (“Method and System for Network Information Access”), U.S. Pat. No. 5,920,856 to Syeda-Mahmood (“System for Selecting Multi-Media Databases Over Networks”), and U.S. Pat. No. 4,914,571 to Baratz et al (“Locating Resources in Computer Networks”), all rely upon obtaining information or META-information about data that is stored in a network and searching that information. All of these techniques also suffer from the issue of currency. That is, is all the information that is being searched all of the information that is available to be searched? In all cases the answer is no.
What would be truly useful is a system and method for searching the entire content of the ever changing World Wide Web in its current state (i.e. the state at the time and date of the searching) in the shortest time possible. Such a system would be able to search not an index of pages, but the pages themselves returning results based upon what actually exists and not based upon a summary of what actually exists.